


If Wishes Were Fishes

by AngelOfDeath10



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - 1980s, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fantasy, Romance, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 11:58:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 21,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21099098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelOfDeath10/pseuds/AngelOfDeath10
Summary: Sarah is just trying to survive her junior year in high school, and by some bizarre cosmic coincidence... so is Jareth. (Dread high school fic, possibly also humor.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Labyrinth, but I wouldn't mind another movie about it. You know. Just putting that out there for the universe.
> 
> If we're going with the movie timeline, roughly, that would make Sarah 15 in 1986-ish. So let's say she's 17 in roughly 1988. Life with no cell phones, can you even imagine it anymore?
> 
> Originally started in 2015. Unsure of completion date...

Sarah swore up and down that, on their family road trip to see Niagara Falls when she was seven, she saw a fairy. There were numerous national parks that they stopped at for her benefit on that trip, something that her mother Linda had smiled about in that way that was all teeth and no eyes. Robert snapped pictures with his camera, which he would later leave undeveloped in a box that probably got lost when Sarah moved with him after the divorce.

But the most important part of that trip to Sarah would always be that she got to see an honest to goodness fairy 'in the wild.' Her classmates were just old enough at the time that her announcement was greeted with equal parts incredulity and hope. It was Bobby Perkins, who swore up and down he did not like Sarah which was why he kept pulling her long braids, that told her she was stupid and stuff like fairies didn't exist. He proceeded to give a very enlightening lecture about Santa Claus when the teacher swooped into the recess line and told Bobby that she would appreciate it if he led the class back to the room quietly. Sarah fumed on her little girl way, stomping out her rage until she took her seat and began to wrangle with numbers instead and forgot how much Bobby needed to go climb in a hole.

No one, in all that time, asked her to really describe what she saw. What she would have said might have surprised them.

***

"Get a load of these!" Dawn did a quick twirl in her all denim outfit and Sarah stifled a giggle.

"What am I looking at, Dawn? Other than a skirt that is going to get you kicked out of algebra for a dress code violation."

With hair extra big today, and even blonder than it had been last week, Dawn looked like she was ready to dance at a concert in a Poison music video. There would be mascara in Sarah's future, most likely at lunch, judging from the disapproving look Dawn was giving her. Secretly Dawn always wished she had a twin sister and her life's work was turning Sarah into that sister if it killed one or both of them.

"You, my little bookworm, are looking at the newest and greatest shoes I ever bought so far this year!"

The low metallic heels stood out from the dark grey of the school's flooring. Sarah noted the chewed gum flattened next to their lockers with disgust, she always seemed to see more than she wanted to. Stowing her chemistry textbook in her locker, she gave her long hair a quick brush while Dawn chattered on.

"I swear I thought you'd die of boredom before I saw you," The weekend had seemed long to Sarah, too, but some of that had to do with her dad pushing college brochures at her. "Your parents are not going to pull this babysitter stuff all spring break are they? I need you! The mall needs you!"

"Spring break isn't for a week," Satisfied enough with what she saw in the mirror, Sarah grabbed her math book and her friend both and shuffled them in the direction of algebra. Dawn played the dumb blond but no one was faster with numbers than her, and she'd scouted out the best schools for finance ages ago. Spring, summer, then a senior year stretched before them and Sarah had the feeling like she'd better enjoy it while it lasted.

Sadly, and Sarah was not proud of this fact, the only reason she was even in the same math class as Dawn was because she worked so darn hard and asked Dawn a lot of questions. So when the teacher 'randomly' paired them up with a new partner for the probability worksheet today, Sarah felt that trickle of dread that preceded a bad grade.

_A spinner is divided into 15 equal regions numbered 1 to 15…_

Ok, so far so good. Dawn was making faces at her from her new seat by the window, the general chaos of movement having obscured her obscenely short skirt from the eagle eye of Mrs. Shapiro.

_What is the probability that 4 consecutive spins result in prime numbers?_

Sarah knew all those words, she performed excellently in English, but somehow this combination of them at this moment looked like gibberish to her. The grim specter of college rose in her mind again as her father's voice droned on about grades and life choices and growing up. It was supremely unfair that all this had to take place on a Monday.

"How am I supposed to know this?" Sarah turned a doe-eyed hopeful face up to her partner and blinked hard as she thought she saw something out of the corner of her eye. Rubbing at it, she refocused in on her partner who would shortly learn she was about as mathematically inclined as a wet rag.

The boy, dressed in a blue plaid shirt and unnervingly tight black pants, gave her a half smile and sat down in Dawn's still warm seat. He looked over to where she was slowly circling question one with her pencil.

"2.56%" He gave her that half smile again, and she found that his indistinct features fell into sharp relief the longer she looked. He was the kind of gorgeous that sighing women usually reserved for idols like Axel Rose. It didn't seem possible that this boy had been in her class all year and she hadn't noticed him. There should have been nasty stares from every girl in the room that she was within five feet of him. "That's the answer, if you need to show work you can see what I already finished."

"Oh thank you, you're like the answer to a prayer," Sarah copied over the first answer and saw he had already made inroads to the second and last questions as well. "You like to skip around, huh? I always have to do things in order."

"Do you have to?" He said it offhandedly, looking bored with the world. So he was one of those boys, the ones that couldn't see anything amazing about the world around them. Already he seemed just a smidge less beautiful to Sarah. Perhaps he was just too good for them all, and that's why His Highness wasn't a school idol she knew about.

Giving him one of her own twisty smiles she met his eyes after scribbling the last of his notes down. Equally intriguing, she couldn't decide if they were green or blue. "I suppose I don't have to. Would you explain to me how you think about it? I'm wide open."

Confusion clicked over to suspicion in his expressive face. Slowly he seemed to come to some conclusion. "Yes, I can see that you are. Where shall we begin…"

"Sarah," she supplied readily. "I hate to say this because I have a feeling you've been in my class this whole time, but I just can't remember your name. That isn't like me, I have a pretty good memory."

"Jareth. My name is Jareth." He stared down at the paper and some of his blond hair feel forward, looking a little shaggy but at least shiny and clean. Too many boys seemed to think showering was vaguely optional and it would have been beyond upsetting if he was among their number. Sarah was having a hard time placing him in a school clique. He didn't scream yuppie or punk, even though the cut of his clothes and the lack of brands plastered on it strongly implied designer. Loner, she supposed, which she could relate to in some respects.

"That's pretty distinctive; I'll bet you don't meet a lot of people with it. I've been 'Sarah W.' since I can remember just so people could tell us all apart. Is that an old Biblical name or something?" She was stalling so they didn't have to talk about math yet, but all good things had to come to an end and she read through another problem slowly.

"Or something," he agreed, and she didn't see it but this time when he smiled at her the smile reached his eyes.


	2. Consideration

"I swear to you, there is a certified Adonis in our math class."

"Pfft, I would have noticed and filled my math notebook with breathless squeeing to you about him if that were true. At least for a week or so. Where are the notes, Sarah? I thought so." Dawn acted like she wasn't deeply invested in consuming the entire hamburger she had bought for lunch. Pretending like her metabolism was low to look dainty was a losing battle.

"No really. He's like if a poster of a model came to life." She blushed as she added self-consciously. "Or like that picture of Galahad on my wall…"

Dawn rolled her eyes, "Weird."

"And that nearly life sized poster of Van Halen on your wall is super normal." Sarah fired back with a laugh.

While Dawn launched into a lecture about all the ways Van Halen was a perfectly normal thing to have on your wall and how time would tell about the brilliance of the album 1984, (which for a while Sarah embarrassingly assumed had something to do with the novel until a rather uncomfortable conversation at a party last year), Sarah tried to think if Jareth was in any of her other classes. For that matter, how many people were in her classes that she had never spoken to or gotten to know? High school had been like a waking dream with homework involved the past nearly three years.

"Ok ok," Dawn didn't need anyone to really listen to her talking, she just liked the sound of her own voice and normally Sarah didn't mind playing the good listener. Today it just felt like she had something important to say and Dawn was making a joke out of it. "I get it. I just wanted to know if you knew him."

Her huffing sigh followed by stuffing her homemade PBJ sandwich in her face was greeted by a sly smile from Dawn. "Ohhhh, that's how it is. You like him." Protests were useless with her mouth full of peanut butter. "It's about time. I thought you were going for this nun vibe and it was kinda bumming me out because you're so pretty and boys check you out all the time even when you don't wear makeup."

"Stop saying that like it's a bad thing." Sarah rebutted after swallowing a lump of bread so hastily she was afraid she'd get hiccups. "And I do wear lipstick." This was not the first she's heard of 'boys checking her out' and the discomfort that generated was still remarkable. Her mother was the sex symbol, the starlet, and the thought that she was like some carbon copy of her waiting to be sprung on unsuspecting men made her skin crawl. After seeing her mom sleep to the top of her field practically on screen Sarah almost wished she could just ignore sex until she was in college or had changed her name or something. The expectations that she be her mother's daughter just made dating hormonal boys impossible to navigate.

"Anyway," Sarah said as Dawn nibbled at her burger. "Even if I did like him I hardly know him. I'm sure if I got to talk to him more we would just end up talking about my mom and it would get weird like how it always does."

"You are nothing like your mom." Said with the strength of friendship behind it rather than truth, it still made Sarah feel good to hear those words said out loud. Mirrors didn't lie and Sarah well knew that she was Linda in looks enough that her father assumed things she thought and did had to follow the pattern of his ex-wife. Their recent fights made that all too clear and words like _selfish_ and _manipulative_ couldn't be unsaid.

"Thanks."

***

Sarah kept a lookout, but there was no sign of Jareth in Theater or P.E. (inattention got her an extra lap when she had to ask the teacher which team she'd been placed on for soccer). Flushed and tired she arrived to English, her last class of the day, and was pleased to note the blue plaid shirt from earlier. Feeling bold, she waved at him and it took him a few seconds to realize she wanted his attention. He tilted his head and raised a hand in greeting when the teacher started to talk and Sarah whipped her head around to attend to her favorite subject.

They were finishing up _Fahrenheit 451_, required reading for their year, and moving into the obligatory Shakespeare unit. The play for junior year was _Hamlet_, and most of the class was just looking forward to a short book. The theater people were dramatically ramping up and talking about digging out skull props, and Sarah knew it was going to be hard to stay on track with so many theater people in this period. In any case it would be much better than _Romeo and Juliet_ freshman year, with everyone looking around and giggling about outdated curses and biting thumbs at one another.

First things first, and there was a collective groan as their final essays about _Fahrenheit 451_ were coming back to them now that they'd been graded this past weekend. At would be at least twenty minutes of comparing grades and asking the teacher questions before he got things under control again since Mr. Marshall was brilliant but not the best when it came to classroom order. A notoriously tough grader, she was pleased to see an A- circled in green at the top of her carefully written paper about breakdowns in communication and how no one really sees the world past television these days.

"I'm delighted to see that you're more talented at words than you are at numbers." The backhanded compliment made her wince, and she found herself both pleased and annoyed as Jareth slid into the seat behind her. A circle of students around the teacher's desk told her they had some time to kill.

"Thanks?" He had his own paper in hand and she not too subtly peeked over at it and saw the B+. "I suppose you get to be good at everything. Let me guess, you're an athlete and play in the orchestra as well?"

"Viola." He answered simply, and the clear and unapologetic brag in his tone made her roll her eyes. "I don't participate in team sports, but I'm not opposed to exercise as a rule."

Sarah laughed, mostly to hide her nervousness. Something about him was intimidating, from the gracefulness of his gestures as he spoke to the perfect posture as he sat and spoke to her with flawless elocution. Normally by now one of her friends in the theater crowd would have come over to compare grades, but they were nowhere to be found and she assumed his aura might have had everything to do with it. The hum of conversation in the room made this chat feel oddly intimate.

"Are you excited for _Hamlet_? I love Shakespeare but it would have been nice to read a comedy for once. Plus I'm sure I'll have to hear Bryan do the soliloquy about a million times in theater class. Gag." Current alpha male of the theater geeks, Bryan was holding court and loudly lamenting his C with lots of hammy overacting and fake tears. She was sure he acted like that to make up for being too short to seriously be considered for leading roles but landing them anyway to sometimes comic effect.

"Which play would you have preferred?" He folded up his paper into a tight square and put it in his back pocket before leveling her with those eyes of his again.

"I know it's silly, and short, but I'm fond of _The Tempest_. Not really the kind of thing for a lit class though. With _Hamlet_ we get to talk about all sorts of themes, and everyone will really get into it." Pointing over to the theater kids again she smiled fondly. "I think Claire was born to play Ophelia, just look at her!"

Delicate and angelic, long auburn hair in a ponytail behind her, Claire already looked like she was made to be a tragic heroine. Jareth cracked a smile as she pointed the girl out, teeth so white she was sure he'd never touched a cup of coffee in his life.

"No aspirations for playing Ophelia yourself?"

"I don't see myself as the kind of lady who would be driven to madness. At least I hope I wouldn't. I don't think I'd be very convincing." Sardonically and more to herself than for his benefit, she added. "It's not my dream in life to be an actress, as fun as it can be." The enjoyment she got out of performing would quickly be overshadowed by the inevitable comparisons to her mother. Bit parts in school-wide productions were as high as she expected to take her star in that arena, recitations to her dog in the park notwithstanding.

The teacher, huffing and exasperated with explaining his grades, had finally reached the point where he was tired of wasting time and began shooing people back to their seats. Jareth rose from next to Sarah and she was shocked all over again at how someone like him could exist in her school without at least one fangirl or a reputation of any kind. He looked like a lady killer to her. She would have thought she was the only one who knew he existed the way people were giving her blank stares when she asked about him, but she had seen his name on Mrs. Shapiro's role sheet earlier. He definitely was not a figment of her imagination.

"Sometime you should tell me what your dream is, then." It shouldn't have sounded sinister, and his lilting voice was light, but dread pooled in the pit of her stomach.

***

It was later that night, after an hour on the phone with Dawn retelling every tiny thing he said or did around her, when she recalled their interaction and thought it strange there would be a blank cover sheet on his essay. Mr. Marshall didn't stand for 'filler' and would have had angry red comments all over it normally. Things weren't adding up about this boy and getting to the bottom of it sounded like an excellent excuse to spend more time getting to know him. Because it wasn't like she had romantic attachments to him or anything, this was purely an attempt to clearly see how he fit into this world that largely appeared to ignore him.

Dawn had said that if Sarah truly believed that she had a bridge to sell her. Only slightly used.


	3. Consideration II

When you have all the time in the world you get very skilled at ignoring its passing. In his approximately three centuries of life Jareth had gotten quite adept at waiting. The younger and therefore less important son to his father he had been given a title more punishment than honor after his first century and sent to the wilds of the Underground to very literally babysit. Removed from the politics of his people, and practically left in a cupboard for safekeeping should something happen to his older (and much more impetuous) brother, Jareth passed time perfecting the magic he had been born with. Unlike the martial magic inborn to his other sibling, Jareth's strengths were in illusion and disguise, dreams and transformations.

Tricking goblins and small children wasn't exactly a challenge, so when he got to practice on runners he spared no effort to dazzle. It was Jareth that pointed out to his kingly father that runners appeared less often, and that when they did they were by and large much more confused about the rules of the Underground than they used to be. It was a crisis of faith, and Jareth's kingdom was one of the most obvious manifestations.

Bureaucracy being what it was in fae courts, it took nearly another century after Jareth first reported on it when they found they needed to act. Someone had to discover how the world had changed, develop a solution to reinsert knowledge and belief of the fae into it, and at first it seemed like his brother was the man for the job. It didn't take long for his brother to return with tales of horrific wars that gripped every corner of the world, and weapons the like of which their people could not imagine even in nightmares. Whatever his brother had experienced sent him back changed, and unwilling to discuss what it was that had disturbed him so.

No one was ready to volunteer after that, and when they did they were often talked out of it by family members or friends who couldn't bear them to face the trials that a prince of the fae couldn't overcome.

When Jareth volunteered, he remembered that icy feeling that stole over his heart when no one pleaded with him to stay except his mother. And even she didn't try so very hard to keep him. After all these years, despite being her son, there was stigma to being the Goblin King. For a society where it was difficult to have children, being a snatcher of other people's progeny was akin to being a cold blooded murderer. Jareth stole dynasties from mortals.

What seemed like a death sentence to his people had looked all too much to Jareth like freedom.

***

Magic, Jareth discovered, was much harder in the mortal realm. The days when the veil between worlds was thin he felt like himself, but most days he was tired from proximity to iron and the absence of familiar sights and sounds. If homesickness were a real illness, he might have contracted it. That he missed his messy castle full of goblins, their pet chickens, and any number of foster children he had yet to home with likely fae seemed like madness. Why would he miss his burdens as much as he missed power? The vernal equinox was on its way, and with it one of the few days of the year he had a true normality.

"Any big spring break plans?" Sarah asked him, as she scribbled copied answered from his probability review sheet onto her own. Tomorrow, Friday, they had a test and she'd need to study tonight to pass, as he knew her excellent memory for samples was the only reason she could navigate numbers. It had only been a few days but her presence had become one of the things that now distinguished the school days apart from one another. Three years in the school had been a blur until this point.

"I might visit family." Innocuous. True. It sounded like the kind of thing a human boy would do for the artificial holiday these teenagers observed. No one talked about the coming of spring or the changing of seasons like people used to, and like his people still did. The smell of spring in the air was seductive with promises of renewal. Many of the teenagers in school were acting up and the culprit was as much the shifting of the seasons as the anticipation of break, only the humans would never admit to it.

"Oh," she looked disappointed, then said quickly. "I was hoping maybe I'd see you around. Rumor is there's a party this weekend." She didn't say it with any sense of excitement. Perhaps she was testing him to see if he was the kind of person that liked such things. Drunken revels had their place, but he hadn't indulged in such things with any regularity.

Jareth arched an eyebrow at her. She was obviously drawn to him, and once he'd realized she had true sight and could see through his glamour without much effort he became very interested in her as well.

"Are you sure you're not angling for help on the math packets?" He knew she wasn't, but he felt like opening up an opportunity for her to meet him outside of school. It was risky, but it was even more risky to let her continue to nose around him without directing her movements a bit.

Her cheeks colored attractively, and he thought on how she always came to English from P.E. flushed and glowing. She was the kind of girl that the less scrupulous of his kind might lure just to see how prettily she'd scream over her captivity. Jareth had spent too much time with humans and human children to be able to pretend they were toys, but the impulse to play with her a little was strong despite that.

"My family lives nearby, I won't be gone the whole week." Still scribbling notes, he saw the corner of her mouth draw up in a pleased smile. "If you'd like to meet…"

The bell rang before Sarah could give her answer, and that nosy friend of hers practically jumped on top of her to haul her to lunch. Sarah was bringing so much attention to him lately that he found his simple glamour was not holding up against true scrutiny. The friend squinted a little and then gave him a smile that wanted to flirt but came just short out of deference to Sarah.

"You've had her all period and now it's my turn," she stuck out her tongue at him and he allowed himself to stick a little dazzle into the smile he gave back to her in return. A sliver of him worried at what Sarah saw when she looked at him, as he couldn't control that. True sight meant she saw him as he was, not as he projected, and it was a little unsettling that he had no mask where she was involved.

Picking up his books, Jareth moved out of the classroom towards the baseball field where he would read on the bleachers until it was time to go to orchestra. He might present illusions in some classes, but in the ones he cared about—music, chemistry, math—it was all coming from his own effort. It was all to purpose, and all to plan, and he just hoped Sarah didn't present herself as an obstacle to that plan. In his heart, he didn't want to have to choose to harm her for the good of his people, but the equinox would give him the tools determine how big of a threat she might become.


	4. First Day of Spring Break

Last night on the phone, when not outlining all the various ways they were going to strategically hit sales at the mall, Dawn kept interrupting her train of thought by practically shouting 'and omg you have a DATE!' with all the subtly of a gong. Sarah's weak addition of 'study' onto the front of it did not change the fact that she was going to spend time with a boy on a Saturday and that said Saturday was the first day of spring break completely countered the argument that it was necessary for school purposes. Of course deep conversation went into what a person would wear to a date that wasn't a date, to which Sarah halfheartedly pointed out most of what she owned was best paired with jeans, it was still too cold for a short dress, and the rest of her closet looked more at home at a Renaissance fair than real life.

Last night's cold rain made the earth smell like freshly turned dirt and cut grass, and sitting in the park on a still damp bench she wondered if she'd need her umbrella today. Parents had been informed she was meeting a friend to get the work for break done ahead of time and they were so pleased that college didn't get mentioned even once over breakfast. When she had left Toby was still plastered to Saturday morning cartoons in the living room, and Sarah wondered if maybe the TV was a better babysitter than she would ever be.

"Sarah," Jareth seemed to come out of nowhere, but then she had been staring at the duck pond fairly intently. The start she gave caused all her breath to whoosh out and she grabbed her math book and the folder containing her packet of papers to cover up how unbalanced he made her.

"Jareth!" Except for his slightly shaggy hair he looked like a carbon copy of James Dean with his stripped down sense of style, and that brown jacket he wore looked like real leather. Never had a white t-shirt seemed so appealing to her. "No books? I guess we can share mine…"

"I took a walk earlier and didn't want to bring them, I don't live far from here and I'll pick them up on the way."

"There's a café nearby, and they bake too. I go there sometimes…" To escape my family, she didn't add. "… to read. If I get a cinnamon roll and a cup of coffee then they'll let us sit there for a while."

When he held out his hands and offered to take her books Sarah had to calm her clear pleasure over his chivalry. In passing them over she was mortifyingly embarrassed when their fingers brushed and a static shock hit her that nearly made her arm go numb for a moment.

"Ouch! Sorry, did you feel that too?" Her blush was probably turning her red as a tomato but she couldn't help it.

"It's fine," he said, but his smiled wavered just a tad and she saw him subtly flex his fingers as he turned them towards his house. In the future she would not brush her hair so vigorously in the morning. All the static was just ridiculous. What a way to make an impression.

***

"Would you like to come in?" The wrap around porch in the huge old house that Jareth said his family had only recently bought looked like the perfect place to drink tea in summer or watch the stars. It was the kind of old romantic thing that you didn't see in the modern new houses that had been quickly replacing turn of the century family homes. This was more like a mansion than a family home, though, for how old it was.

She didn't remark when he didn't get out any key and simply turned the knob and walked in. Someone had to be home, then. Her step-mother would have fits if she came home after work and found the door unlocked.

"Sure, this house is pretty amazing. I thought I knew all the old houses around here but this one is kind of tucked away." Stepping into the foyer it was like looking back into time. The dining room was as grand and formal as a banquet hall in a fancy restaurant. The living room, in contrast, was more like the 50s had invaded with a strange square couch, old lamps, and a television in one corner that was totally taken apart on top of some kind of tarp. "Having trouble with your tv?"

Jareth looked at the mess in the living room and then back at Sarah as he set her books down on the dining room table to their left. "You could say that. I'll probably have it figured out soon, but it's taking me some time." If she wasn't watching him so closely she might not have noticed the slight tinge of pink to his high cheeks. "I'll return with the books shortly."

It was surreal to see where Jareth lived and she compared it to her own house. Where mail normally rested along with a bowl of keys, there was a pedestal with a plant. No place to put shoes, but then no carpets either just hard wood and beautiful plush area rugs. Everything looked expensive. Her own house seemed modern, beige, and boring in comparison. The only improvement she could think of was that her house at least looked lived in, with Toby's toys laying around as well as jackets on hooks and shoes next to the door. You'd never know people actually lived here.

"Is everyone out today?" Sarah asked as Jareth came back downstairs with his supplies.

"My parents work in politics, I guess you'd say. They travel frequently."

"This is a huge place to ramble about in alone. I'd probably love it for a week and then spend as much time at Dawn's as I could after that." Way to criticize, Sarah, her brain chided.

Jareth didn't seem upset by her words. "I'm used to big living spaces. The appearance of taking up lots of space has always been important to my family, even if we don't use much of it."

"That sounds….." Wasteful? Luxurious? As if realizing that they were alone in a huge house for the first time, Sarah found herself backing up to the door again. "Well, anyway, let's head over to the café, I could use some sugar if I'm going to think about math on my vacation."

***

Maybe it was a date, Sarah mused, when the lady at the counter pushed a warm cookie onto her plate as she paid for her roll and coffee. The accompanying wink, not a bit of discretion involved for that one, made her hope that Jareth had not been observing. The lady at the counter had seen her in here countless times and this was the first time she had ever been here with another person, who just happened to be a boy, so the conclusion she came to was unsurprising. Whatever she said, she wasn't sure that at some point if everyone else thought it was a date then it somehow became one anyway.

It was that magical time after the early morning visitors had left but before the lunch rush so it was nearly deserted in the shop. The smell of baking cookies was everywhere, with the bread having been done much earlier in the day. Jareth had neatly spread their materials around the table near the window, making sure to leave room for plates when she brought them over. He'd already finished the first word problem before she even sat down.

"How do you work it all out so fast?" Sarah was wistful, more than anything, that she didn't have to work so darn hard to get good results at the subject.

"Practice. Familiarity. There's an art to it, I suppose. I have other hobbies that are very like it."

"Playing the viola is like math?" She had heard music and math was related but she was still skeptical.

Jareth set his pencil down and noted the cookie she slid at him with slight shock. "Reading music often reminds me of math and language both. And chemistry and math are pretty closely allied as well." He seemed to light up in a way as he spoke about it. Alone at school. Alone at home. When did he get to talk to anyone about things that mattered to him?

"Are you in the math club? I don't see you hang out with anyone in class." Or talk to anyone, even a teacher, excluding me this week. Sarah had lots of casual friends in her classes, and she wasn't a social butterfly by any means so his isolation continued to bother her.

He broke off the side of the cookie and then left the broken pieces on the plate as he answered. "I have projects and research I do at home. If there were a club that approached that, then I would join. Math is just a means to an end."

"At least you know what you want to do. Dawn will probably be the only hard rocking accountant I know. Meanwhile I can't even decide on a college to apply to."

"I didn't know at first." He was in another world, remembering something, then he focused back in on Sarah and she felt like an ant under a magnifying glass, but also a little flushed and tingly.

It was hard for Sarah to let this go, with college being the number one reason she and her dad could barely be in the same room as one another. It was a terrible thing to Sarah when her step-mother was the only parental figure she could stand these days, not that she was a bad person or anything. Losing the close relationship she had had with her father still hurt a lot more than she'd ever tell anyone.

"So what's it all for then? The projects and all this work you do that means you're too busy for anything else, what's the end game?" She shouldn't be so familiar with him, probably. Right now Dawn would be smacking her for talking about school stuff when she could be asking him about other more important things. Purposefully unused to the dance that made up flirting, Sarah just allowed the shimmering feeling that this was a date to fade back to study date in her mind. That calmed down the rapid beat of her heart, and brought her expectations back to simply getting the assignment out of the way before she enjoyed her break. Peace of mind felt a lot like disappointment.

Jareth gave her a weird look, like he was taking her measure. Then, throwing it out almost like it didn't matter to him, he turned back to the math problem with that terrifyingly appealing concentration he had previously applied to her.

"Computers." Was his much too casual comment on her probing questions.


	5. It's My Party

Dawn pulled up in the hissing truck that had been her brother's until he left for college last year and honked the horn. Other than the mildly disapproving look from her father and the cautious smile from her step-mother, Sarah didn't meet any resistance as she leapt up from the dinner table and grabbed her jacket on the way out the door. Half eaten meatloaf couldn't compare to getting to stay out late on a Sunday when it wasn't even summer.

"Don't forget, I have to be home by midnight!" Sarah chimed as she attempted to close the passenger side door. It usually took a couple tries before it caught, one of the many reasons her father hated it when Dawn took them anywhere. She rolled down the window a crack to escape the smell of Dawn's hairspray.

"Uh huh, or you turn into a pumpkin." Dawn mumbled while the engine chugged over her words.

"That's right, a grounded pumpkin, and I actually want to enjoy my break."

"I'd hoped you'd say that," Dawn gave her a smile that promised mischief. "And that's why I brought an emergency fashion intervention kit with me. I knew you were going to dress like we were going to a school dance."

The gears ground out their pain as Dawn shifted and took off back to her place. Sarah was never going to get used to her friend's jerky driving, but she wasn't going to complain as it beat the pants off of asking for rides from other people.

"Your parents need to get you an automatic!" Sarah yelled over the engine. They never tried to listen to the radio in the car because they would have had to turn it up too loud.

"Not until this one dies!"

"Is that why you still can't drive a stick?!"

They didn't bother talking until Dawn pulled into the parking lot of a fast food restaurant and jumped out of the driver's side in an unreasonably spry fashion for being dressed in an electric blue fabric tube with ruffles.

"Now you are going to march into that bathroom and put these on. Every bit, and know that you would have shoes in there too if we were the same size so you get to keep the flats for now."

"I see a teasing comb in there and I'm already saying no to that."

"You didn't draw the line at lying that we were going to a movie, but big hair is taking it too far?"

Sarah felt like the occasional subterfuge was part of being a teenager, but what Dawn was kindly not remarking on was that Jareth had actually expressed vague curiosity in the party tonight when she had mentioned it again at the café. She remembered him mentioning that today was the vernal equinox and she couldn't shake the feeling that that connected somehow, but she couldn't think of any reason why that didn't involve some sort of interest in pagan rituals. Maybe his family were into different sorts of religious worship than their largely Christian community. Probably some hippy holdovers from when his parents grew up in the 60s she would bet.

"Well, we did see Moonstruck last month. It isn't like we never went to it." Sarah actually did feel guilty about the lie but wanting to see Jareth before whatever trip he took to see his family had made her reckless. "My hair is fine like this."

Pulling out the dress Dawn had picked out for her, she wanted to recoil a little. It was powder pink and it had poofy shoulders. Used to the simple lines of her medieval style dresses, the scratchy and shiny fabric seemed harshly alien. It also seemed way too short. She took a deep breath while she changed in the bathroom and Dawn bought them sodas.

"See? Legs for days. You never show off your best assets." Shoving the cups into Sarah's hands she pushed her back into the bathroom. "Now about that makeup…"

***

Jareth watched impassively as teenagers drank themselves into a stupor, arguing over which mix tape should go on next or playing games where the point of it seemed to be to drink more whether you won or lost. All it was missing was a bonfire and it was not be unlike some of the revels of his people. It was funny how civilizations seemed to recreate the same things, which he supposed pointed to some commonality. Right now the commonality was trying to shove a red plastic cup of beer into his hand.

Right now his family was probably in their own revel and remarking on his absence this year and what it could mean. They would want a report of his progress, and as usual he would have to tell them to wait another season while he progressed in his studies. Becoming a proper engineer had to be learned in stages just like magic or alchemy. He would not master modern technology with a snap of his fingers, nor could he make it do his bidding that way. Machines didn't care about illusion or dreams, and they had no organic minds to persuade or confuse. If his people were to survive this crisis of faith he needed to conquer what put humanity in thrall, and he was sure computers held the key.

Avoiding the probing questions of his family wouldn't have been the reason to come here tonight, though, and he knew the real answer lay in a pair of green eyes that against all logic he found himself searching for. He wanted to see Sarah again and in turn be seen by her. If he could find a way to repeat their electric connection and this time brace for it and channel it, then all the better. Magic crackled in his veins, ready to be used, and he wondered if he could fool even her today when he had his powers back.

Jareth heard the car before he saw it, and then from his perch on the front porch of the house he had the distinct pleasure of watching the car make a 32-point parallel parking attempt down the block before the doors opened and Sarah and her friend descended. This was a Sarah he hadn't expected to see, looking more like a woman than a girl. He thought about slowing down time and inserting himself closer to her, but decided that allowing things to take their own path and for her to see him in her own time might be equally enjoyable. Delayed gratification was not something many fae even considered, usually, but nearly two centuries in near isolation from his people had given him some perspective.

If people treated you as something different for long enough maybe you really did change. In that case, who was the Goblin King?

"Jareth!" Sarah easily spotted him, as usual, and she lengthened her strides to meet him while her friend greeted others on the path up to the house. "You came after all!" Her relief was clear to him, and he searched her face for any crack in that sincerity.

"You look exceptional as always." He answered and gave the kind of bow one might before a dance and then offered his arm to her. Never in his wildest dreams had he thought he'd be asking a girl to dance to someone proclaiming 'it ain't nothin' but a good time' in the background, but maybe it could be excused as normal in this reality.

Sarah looked thrilled, gracing him with the kind of unguarded smile that made him remember a time before he was the Goblin King and ladies sought him out for his own merits. Even with her hand on his jacket he could feel the potential of their connection, and he dearly hoped that what he was going to show her tonight wouldn't spell her downfall. It would make his life here abruptly less pleasant if he had to remove her memories.


	6. And I'll Cry If I Want To

Sarah sat on the plastic seat of the child's swing set that looked forlorn in the backyard of the house that the spring break party continued to rage in. The noise was escalating and a dog barked from in a fence down the way. They would be lucky if the cops were not called about the noise, but no consequences other than hangovers seemed forthcoming. It was dark in the yard, just a puddle of light from the window of the door to the kitchen and a sliver of moon high in the sky. On the swing next to her was Jareth, who had suggested they step outside when the oppressive heat and noise had made it impossible to communicate in anything but gestures. A couple boys sat on the back porch drinking beers and flicking bottle caps competitively at garbage cans nearby. Their presence was annoying, but assured Sarah she was not really alone out here with a boy.

If Dawn had heard her say something like that out loud she would have called her a priss, and rightly so. Rocking back and forth on her heels to move the swing the barest amount, Sarah looked at the blinking stars and sighed. Now was the time to say something to this beautiful, unreachable boy before he was gone for break and she was blowing it.

"I have to admit, Sarah, I had an ulterior motive for this evening," Jareth's voice betraying more than a hint of excitement and Sarah felt her heart speed up. Did he feel their connection as well? Was he going to ask her out? "Close your eyes and take my hands."

It seemed a reasonable enough thing to ask, even romantic. The pinging and laughter from the steps told her they were not truly alone and the added a measure of safety to the activity. His fingers ghosted over her palms and then loosely encircled both her wrists. Involuntarily, she jerked back a little as that static-y feeling was present for just a moment and then faded. Warmth suffused her body and she found she wanted to relax far more than the tiny swing's plastic seat really allowed for under the circumstances.

"Now tell me what you see." His voice washed over her, different somehow, and Sarah opened her eyes with a smile only to try to pull away immediately. His grip went from soft to steely and her lungs pumped like bellows as she jerked against him once more and tried to get a grip on reality.

Jareth was still Jareth but enough unlike him to inspire fear that he had slipped something into the cup of soda she had accepted earlier. His hair had exploded around his head, longer and fuller than Dawn could dream of even with the aid of hairspray, and his skin had a sheen to it as light from the house bounced off of him. His eyes looked tilted, sharper, one of them clearly blue and the other clearly green rather than the mercurial mix she had been admiring for days. His clothes were as tight as ever but now he looked like someone had glitterbombed a Regency dandy.

"I don't see anything," she grit out.

"Liar." He leaned forward and she turned her head away, unwilling to meet his eyes. He smelled like the forest after it rained from this distance. "You know to be afraid. I wonder who taught you that."

"Let me go or I will call for help and those two meatheads over there will beat you up."

"My dear, they would never hear a thing, your threat is empty as you well know." He almost seemed to pity her, which was all the more angering.

Stupid, stupid Sarah. She had walked right into this, so blind to his nature, totally forgetting the lessons of her childhood. It had been years; she hadn't sought the fae out since she had put away the fairy tales and picked up history books and literature. Pretending like brownies or fairies were cute when she remembered twisted root creatures and their sharp teeth, and tiny cruel pixies pulling wings off of flies caught in spider webs and laughing… She would never explain to anyone why she avoided hawthorn trees, or addressed all people with unusual politeness. How quickly she had forgotten! Could she blame puberty?

"I'll fight you every step!" She growled.

"Pardon?" Jareth had the nerve to laugh, making Sarah start her struggles anew.

"You can't blind me with your spells for long; your kind has tried before. I'll escape no matter what it costs me!" She didn't want to spend seven years as a fairy bride! What about college!? Sarah was practically spitting fire.

Jareth went from amused to tired almost immediately. "Abduction is not my intent, Sarah. Though I will admit the more you struggle, the harder it is to convince the darker part of my nature not to try."

"Then let me go!" Sarah was dismayed, disappointed to find she had been starting to nurse a crush on a soulless creature like him.

Against type and expectation Jareth did just that, immediately, and turned his face to the ground in front of him. Rubbing her wrists absently as if to rid herself of the feel of his skin, there was first the sense of loss rather than disgust. Sarah's constricted pupils made her feel like she had gone blind momentarily, but as she purposefully slowed down her breathing and tried to regain a sense of normalcy she snuck looks over at Jareth. He seemed himself again, the himself she had been expecting tonight with his slightly too long blond hair and plain but expensive looking clothing. For the first time she noted how carefully he avoided touching the metal links on the sides of the swing as he kept his hands folded in his lap.

"You didn't react as I expected you to, Sarah. It was not my intention to frighten you so." When he met her eyes she searched for a trace of that painfully beautiful alien visage he had displayed but saw only the almost still unworldly handsome boy she had been just getting to know. He could not lie, she well knew, but deception wasn't always just about words.

Sarah hugged the metal links of the chains to her sides like armor, unsure of how much iron would really be in them, and told herself that she was not insane. This was really happening and she had to deal with it. Charming tales of moving trees and dangerous elementals from a kid was one thing, but she was nearly an adult and it would only land her in a ward if she went to the police and told them that a fae man had tried to abduct her. At best it might get a laugh from them. And what if they called her parents? Her famous mother would have to hush it up to save the tabloid fodder it would provide.

"So you thought I'd be super excited to follow you to your kingdom under the hill, or wherever it was you planned on taking me?!" Sarah said, trying not to let her voice raise enough to alert the meatheads who seemed to be dusting themselves off and heading inside again. The music blared as the door opened, and then they were truly alone in the backyard. The damn dog was still barking, wearing away Sarah frayed nerves.

"I had no such plan." Now it was his turn to close his eyes and sigh. "And if I had I would not have been so careless in its execution."

"So what is this then? You show off and laugh at me? Is that what this is?" Somehow it would be far more disappointing if that's what this was about. Apparently being made fun of was more emotionally traumatizing than kidnapping, and Sarah once again wished she could skip straight through her teenage years.

Sarah watched Jareth trace a pattern in the air absently, and a warm wind started up out of nowhere. It smelled fresh and clean, and it made him smile. The smile didn't seem mocking or triumphant, it seemed incidental.

"What do you want from me then?" Sarah wasn't scared now, she was just confused. Anger lingered like a shield to keep her from the hurt that she knew would visit her tonight as she clutched a pillow to her chest and worried. The things she had willfully not seen would be so much harder to ignore now.

Standing from the swing, Jareth walked a little ways in front of her with his arms folded in front of him defensively. The wind was stronger now, pulling at her hair.

"I truly wish I could say nothing." He answered her without turning around and before she knew it she was blinking grit out of her eyes unsettled by the whipping air and Jareth was gone. By the time she had cleared her vision, an owl too large and distinctive to be natural flew past her and into the night.

That's what she got for lying and going to a dumb kegger across town, she grimly thought as she continued to swipe at her eyes. And what in the hell was she going to tell Dawn?


	7. Saturday's Child Works Hard

Supernatural creatures really took all the fun out of the start of summer.

"Sarah, come _on_." Dawn pulled her through the fluorescent halls to the food court and she stood in line woodenly beside her friend as Dawn bought them each a slice of pizza and then steered her to a plastic chair bolted with a metal pipe to a plastic table. It was like kiddy furniture for adults, or almost adults.

Last week when Sarah was forced to visit with a psychologist to talk about what her family was calling her "nervous breakdown over college" had been so painfully awkward that it had tipped the balance for Sarah to reenter the real world. Dawn was a champion friend and had stood by all of Sarah's weirdness even when she refused to go 50 feet from her house during spring break, and since then had practically only spent time at home and at school. Secretly (something Sarah could not share yet) there had also been trips to the library and other places, but no one was auditing her library card and movements. Maybe the government.

"Now _dish_." The pizza was slowly congealing as she watched, with grease collecting in the dimples. "You've been all weird since the night of that dumb spring break party and I need you to level with me _for real_."

Honestly Sarah was shocked she'd been able to dodge Dawn's questions for as long as she had. It had been easy to say it was stress because of tests or family stuff or college stuff or PMS or any number of other things that could easily conceal a dark mood. If it was this easy to slide under the radar of people who loved her then she wondered how easy it would be to get lost in the crowd if she had real problems. Sarah was still unsure the fae counted as 'real problems.'

"I'm going to tell you something, but you can't laugh at me."

"Cross my heart. You backed up my electric yellow jumpsuit the other day instead of piling on the 'banana' train so I owe you."

Sarah took a deep breath. It was so hard to explain. "Remember in middle school when you came to my room and saw the horseshoe over my door and started to gush about how much you loved horses?"

"What does that have to do with—" Dawn screwed up her face in confusion.

Sarah interrupted. "And I told you I loved them too, and we talked about all the times we had been horseback riding and on and on… well the truth is I rode a horse a few times but they terrified me. I only went to that horse camp as an excuse to get ahold of the horseshoe without making it seem weird."

"I think it's a lot weirder you went to a camp for something you were terrified of…" Dawn mumbled and took a bite of the pizza to keep from saying more. She was obviously disliking their happy childhood memories being tarnished.

"You don't understand, before middle school started I did everything in my power to protect myself from, ugh, this is where you're going to think I'm weird… _fairies_."

Dawn kept chewing but gave Sarah an arch look. "Is this what you saw that shrink for last week?"

"My family thinks I'm freaking out about college," Sarah said dismissively. "And I am, but not as much as I worry about _Jareth_."

"Who?"

"Exactly."

"Sarah Williams you better start making sense or I am going to rat you out to the school counselor and it's going to be puppets and feelings galore!" Dawn would do it, too, of that Sarah had no doubt.

With a long suffering sigh she tried to explain. "I couldn't talk to you about Jareth because after the night I found out he was a fae no one else could remember him. I tried to explain to you about this the day after and you were too hungover and said I was making things up, which would make sense if you were hung over but you _never drink when you drive_. I was alone with him for a couple hours, but I know you wouldn't do that to us."

"That's true, but you drove us home that night…. Right?" Dawn seemed unsure.

"And then I tried to talk to you again about him when we were back in classes but you kept giving me this blank look even though _he is still in our math class_!" Sarah had been so wound up the past month and a half that she knew her voice was rising in pitch as she was telling this story. "Remember when I helped you with that problem in the spring break packet and you were amazed I knew the answer? I told you I had done the problems with Jareth, I even pointed him out to you, and you just gave me this funny smile and acted like I hadn't said anything!"

Being the only person who knew a supernatural being existed, and then also having to see said supernatural being every day for two class periods a day was wearing Sarah down like water washing away stone over time. She had read up on everything she had forgotten over the years first of all, then had bought iron nails to carry around with her all the time. If she could have built a moat around her house then she would have, and she was always turning all the lights on in full wherever she went. In a moment of true desperation, she had convinced her step-mother to take her to a nursery to look for some spring plants to put in the yard and surreptitiously broke off some rowan branches from a tree there which she had taped to her mirror when she wasn't sure what else to do with them.

Meanwhile, Jareth had been perfectly civil and normal towards her as if none of her insanity was his doing and he were a regular boy! He'd greet her in the morning if he saw her, and nodded to her as she entered the classroom, but he didn't approach her otherwise. Simultaneously she was relieved and hated him for his restraint.

Pizza now just a crust, which Dawn wouldn't eat, she wiped the grease from her fingers to a flimsy paper napkin and thought out loud. "Now, if I was going to believe you, which I'm not sure I do, and I really don't remember this guy you're talking about, which I highly doubt would happen, then what is it exactly that he did the night of the party that has you going all conspiracy theory on me?"

"Well he…" Sarah floundered for words while Dawn took a bite of Sarah's yet uneaten pizza. "Fae men are notorious for kidnapping human women for various purposes. I'm protecting myself."

"You don't seem kidnapped to me." Dawn said with a smile, clearly not on board the whole Jareth story train but also not laughing at Sarah as she feared might happen in this situation. "Maybe if this guy is treating you like a normal person and he isn't bursting into your window at night or luring you into dark woods… he isn't going to kidnap you, duh."

Ugh! Dawn was missing the whole point! Sarah was a soldier on a battlefield that only she could see, and Dawn was treating her like she was overreacting! But as Dawn actually began to catalog her interactions with Jareth she started to wonder if she had cast him as a villain too quickly.

"So what I'm hearing is you met some guy, he turned out to be a fairy, he helped you with your math homework, and you hung out at a party for a while where he did not kidnap you. And even though no one else sees him or can remember him, he hasn't done anything more than help you edit your essay on Hamlet or whatever since? You're going to need a better delusion if you want your shrink to get you out of class again." Dawn was halfway done with Sarah's pizza by the time Sarah had pulled her pride up enough to respond to that.

Sarah twisted the cheap iron ring she had been wearing around in a circle on her finger. Dawn always seemed to put things in perspective. This was not some epic adventure with dangers untold that Sarah was the hero of, this was her losing her mind over a boy because she had made all sorts of assumptions about him when she had found out he was different. The one and very most true thing Dawn had pointed out was that he had had every opportunity to kidnap her, or do any number of things to her without anyone else aware of his existence, and instead he had given her space.

"I'm such an idiot." Was all Sarah got out before she slumped into her folded arms on the table, exhausted after weeks on an adrenaline high. "I'll get my head on straight starting tomorrow I promise." _Tomorrow is Beltane…_ her voice of warning called out in her mind. But now Sarah felt strong enough to tune out those voices by sensibly reminding them that it was just Sunday, May 1st as well and nothing to make a big deal out of. She had let fear control her for too long. It was about time she confronted those fears.

"Good," Dawn picked up their paper plates and chucked them into the nearby garbage can. "Now let's get you some coverup for those circles under your eyes. You look like hell."


	8. And Sunday's Child Even Harder

Jareth contemplated that, when you were out of your mind and surrounded by others similarly afflicted it was a party, but when you were experiencing it alone you were just insane.

Beltane was here and he was struggling with holding onto any semblance of order in his mind as he was addled by magic. Avoiding his family during Ostara has been so satisfying his plan had been to avoid them yet again, thinking they would hardly notice his absence, but they had responded by casting spells first to compel him to return home and then (when they had proved futile) to simply make him feel uncomfortable in his own skin. All of this was only possible today as the veil was so thin sometimes reality in front of him stretched and tore, allowing his family the ability to reach into the mortal world. Base stubbornness was all that held him here now. Had his family invited him home instead of trying to force him he might have been less capricious.

His "bonfire" in the fireplace was piled high with wood and would have seemed jolly if not for the unseasonably hot day making the residence more like a sweat lodge than a stately old home. Looking over the scattered parts around a mostly reassembled television he thought he saw it begin to melt, but did not trust his eyes.

The doorbell rang and Jareth at first dismissed it as another illusion, as no one visited him in this home. No mail came to his door. No window washers or vacuum salesmen. No children peddling cookies. So when it continued to ring insistently, then almost angrily, he finally stirred himself to check on it. To find Sarah on the other side of the door was less surprising than it should have been, but did register in his mind slightly. He arched an eyebrow as she squinted bracingly against the inferno of heat that poured out of the door and blew back her hair slightly.

"I need to talk to you. May I come in?" She said it with a grudging sort of tone that was on the brink of unfriendly without quite making it there. Jareth could smell the iron on her and suspected salt in her jean pockets as well, both making his skin crawl even more, but he gave a wan smile and a sarcastically courtly bow instead of slamming the door in her face.

"Please, my lady, I'm honored by your visit." This was the kind of day that exaggerated his theatrics as well as invited mischief. In his mind he was white knuckling his way through a labyrinth of confusion and here was Sarah like a ripe peach inviting herself into his sanctum. "Even if I question the wisdom of your timing."

Once the door closed behind her he saw her begin to sweat, beads of it forming on her forehead. Nearly immune as she was to magic, or so it seemed without direct contact, he wondered if she could feel how lousy this place was with it. She felt the heat, but did she feel the pull?

"Ah Sarah, Come to be my May Lady?" He said it as a joke, to watch her squirm, but realized belatedly he did in fact wish it were true. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat and that hid her blush, but the anger he sparked was very satisfying with those astonishingly green eyes of hers looking like she wanted to pin him to a wall.

"I came to apologize, but you're not making it easy at all!"

Idle thoughts, searing his brain, of her as May Lady and him as May Lord were drawn back to the present reality as his mind actually relayed her words to a place that could process them. Embers from the fire turned into butterflies in the corner of his vision, so just to make sure he had heard her correctly he asked her to repeat herself.

"You'll have to repeat that, I don't think I heard you properly."

"You heard me just fine! I said I came to apologize, but if you're just going to make fun of me…" A threat she couldn't finish with anything that could possibly intimidate him with made her words die in the air.

He was lost in her eyes already, barely in the room with her, reminded of fresh leaves of trees and laying in the new shade while wrapping her in his arms. She just had to choose the most trying day to confront him, after weeks of misplaced anger. The television had finished melting in the living room, leaving a puddle that resembled a small pond, and Jareth firmly ignored it.

"Please have a seat. I'd offer you refreshments but I highly doubt you'd accept them."

"You're right about that."

"I'm right about most things."

Sarah snorted at his easy egotism. "Not everything?"

Jareth watched her sit in a low green chair that, to his eyes, seemed covered in moss. She did not express any surprise so at least he had some concrete indicator that she wasn't experiencing what he was. This felt like his mother's touch, and knew the dreams she was sending were just a prelude to nightmares later, thought the two were not mutually exclusive. What a delightful family he had.

"I try to leave room for uncertainty. It's more scientific that way."

He was stalking her. If she knew it or not, he could feel how his body tensed, how he had positioned himself near the closest exit to block her way. Fae instinct told him a mortal woman was here before him on a high holiday and he was mandated to claim her, but the same impulse that had him gritting his teeth against his family's magic told him that taking her was not about choice if he gave in. Giving in to impulse, to his family's illusion, meant his own will meant nothing in this circumstance. Pride sustained his sanity and Sarah's virtue both.

"I saw pixies for the first time in a national park on a family road trip. They were strange creatures wrapped in dirty ribbons like small mummies. They tried to get me to come with them to drink mushroom wine and ride horses. I remember saying no because, even though it sounded like fun they looked… hungry. And their teeth were so sharp and pointy."

Jareth let her talk, watching her draw her hair to one side and swipe at the sweat beginning to pour off of her now. He was on the verge of offering to remove her clothes and help that suffocating heated feeling, but knew those weren't his own thoughts and dismissed them back into the luxurious darkness of his mind.

"No one believed me so eventually I stopped trying to talk about them, but I still saw them everywhere after that. I watched them play tricks or run about and game in the woods. I saw all the terrible things they did to one another and people before they laughed and laughed, but I didn't totally put them out of my mind until I was nearly 13."

He was trying to listen to her, he really was, but Jareth just wanted to slide next to her on the couch and kiss her into unconsciousness before binding her in spider silk and secreting her away to his castle in the Goblin Kingdom. A third of his mind told him to do just that, another third hissed warnings that he was weak to madness, and the last third simply wanted the other two voices to cease bothering him. Sorting out the truth from it all was forcing his patient smile to look sharp and feral. Sarah was very purposefully not making eye contact with him, perhaps cluing into his unstable state.

"The local fae grew tired of being laid so bare in front of me, or so they said when they came for me while I was reading in a park, and they tried to take me… but their spells did nothing."

"How trying." Jareth sounded bored, but the façade was his way of staying calm and in control.

"I told them baldly they were figments of my imagination. That I was too old for this nonsense. At first they were confused, but after I told them half remembered gibberish from talking in class about psychology they just… left." Sarah still seemed confused by her own memory. "And the funny thing was, after that I really didn't see them. Maybe I had convinced myself not to believe to protect myself…"

He hoped she would finish her story and leave soon, for her own safety.

"I boxed it off as delusions and they you just… appeared that night. Oh stop that!" As soon as she brought up that night they almost kissed he had just fallen into his other self, ornamental and grand with a sweeping cloak of white feathers that were killing him in this heat.

Dropping the cloak behind him, and the gloves shortly after, Jareth sat on the couch that was next to the green chair and grasped her hand. He needed to touch her skin and she gasped as soon as they were skin to skin, fingers entwined.

"What the _hell_?! What did you do to me?!" He suspected she could now see all the fever dreams around her, further confirming to him that physical contact seemed to break that immunity she otherwise possessed to his kind's works.

"What you are experiencing, my dear," the words slipped out and he wished he could reclaim them, "is a piece of the distraction I am burdened with today. So, if you'll excuse my inability to focus on your charming attempt to explain to me why you hate me so ferociously, then you can also recognize that the best thing you can do is exit my home swiftly and try this experiment another day."

"Is this _moss_?!" She turned betrayed and angry eyes his way, but all he saw was passion in his blind state.

Madness was what it was, but later he would realize madness alone would not account for what came over him as he leaned forward and crushed his lips to hers. The bite of his mother's magic, very much like spiritual pain, seemed to quiet while he was bruising Sarah's soft lips. She was relief, she was an oasis, and partially influenced by the day his body told him there was more that could yet be achieved with a willing woman.

The ringing slap Sarah gave him was not fully undeserved, so when she stormed out Jareth did nothing to prevent her exit. All he was left with was unfulfilled desire, hallucinations, and the sinking sensation that now he was the one that would have to apologize. The last issue was the most galling.


	9. Let's Make a Deal

It was still cool, but with warmth a promise on the wind, and Sarah wondered how much longer she'd have to endure stuffy classrooms before summer. There were an actual number of days of school left which Dawn could probably quote to the minute when prompted, but the daily grind of class was not what made her itchy. Ever since she had tried to go apologize she had pointedly avoided the increasingly brooding fae, which was challenging when they shared two classes a day. Today she was seriously considering skipping class—a piece of rebellion she was saving for a life changing crisis or being struck by inspiration to write the next great American novel—and it seemed almost mundane that it would be over something as silly as boy trouble.

Moving like liquid in his painted on jeans, Sarah watched Jareth approach her with a sense of fatalism and amended her earlier thought: she had man trouble. Something too much like a smirk rode on his face when she huffed her disgruntlement but made no obvious retreat from the bleachers next to the packed dirt track. It would have been safer in the cafeteria for lunch, but the fresh air and a little solitude had seemed appealing. A part of her wondered if she had been magically coerced by Jareth to get her alone… but it was more likely she had subconsciously wanted to talk to him anyway and provided the opportunity. It might be better to get things out of the way rather than feel his stare bore holes in her a couple hours a day.

He stopped at the base of the bleachers and turned that uncannily handsome face up towards her. Gesturing at the bleachers he projected as nicely as her theater arts teacher towards her.

"My lady, I would speak with you."

Sarah looked down at the aluminum seats with their steel undergirding and the smiling man below and sighed internally.

"You seem to be communicating just fine where you are." With all her anger, Sarah thought she would be ready to be disgusted to interact with him, but honestly it had been hard to hold onto truly righteous indignation as her brain retconned the whole experience at his house into a romantic adventure. No matter how she reminded herself of the danger, of his rudeness, the call to battle that had her ringing his ears with a slap just simply was not there. It was terrible when you couldn't trust your own mind, and with fae involved reality had a way of warping. Hormones might also be involved, but she liked to think she was above all that.

"I would think you wouldn't want to have a personal conversation loud enough for any passerby to hear."

"Oh, people can see you today? Is that how it is?"

His smile faltered only a moment at her words. "You of all people know how important it is for me to minimize contact with the mortal realm."

"No, I can't say I do know since you've made almost no effort to 'minimize contact' with me!" Sarah used the air quotes as sarcastically as she was able. Sadly, he did have a point, as some of the soccer players on the sidelines of the nearby field were looking at them curiously. On any given day in high school there was always a free show somewhere, and Sarah wanted to avoid the rumor mill if possible. For all she knew it looked like she was yelling at no one.

"About that…"

Sarah moved down a few rows, unwilling to totally relinquish the high ground and the safety of the steel undergirding. "Yes? I'm all ears, Jareth." He blinked hard as she casually let his name roll off her tongue. It seemed oddly intimate, as if she had rehearsed it to the point of causal familiarity. Sarah let loose a string of curse words in her own mind at the slip. In her fantasy world she would be coolly scathing and above it all, not blowing her hair out of her face on a bleacher while rolling up the sleeves of her floral print blouse.

"We seem to have started off on, as you might say, the wrong foot." He gestured expressively with his hands, the only indicator to Sarah that he was invested in the conversation because his tone was blasé. "You have a knack for encountering me at not particularly advantageous times."

For something that might have started out as hinting at apology, he was very good at implying everything was her fault. Familiar resentment put her on surer ground with this man.

"Well, your highness will have to pardon me, perhaps you can provide me a calendar to plan around your obviously busy schedule of molestation."

"I'm trying to explain to you that the incident which you seem to still be upset over won't be repeated, and you're childishly not willing to listen." There was a little bit of strain in his voice, but the expression continued to be neutral. "And incidentally, it's 'Your Majesty'."

Of course he would be royal, that would only be a cherry on the top of this crappy sundae. "Your reassurances sound a lot like blaming me for being stupid!"

"You were being stupid!" He snapped, eyes starting to flash a little, still that indeterminate blue-green that she couldn't tell was glamour or not. "Do you really think some scissors and a little salt in your pocket would protect you if I lose my senses?! What was your escape plan? Did anyone know you were with me? Your blatant lack of self-preservation is annoyingly obtuse!" Jareth obviously wanted to say more but he gathered his calm almost instantly.

"I suppose you want me to thank you for all your valuable advice and concern." She was blushing and she knew it, despite the confident front Sarah worked to maintain around him she had to admit he was right. She had not taken any but the most basic precautions, and she hadn't realized how much more powerful he was than the pixies and tree spirits she knew as a child until she had seen the world melting around her at his touch. Jareth was a whole other level of fae, and she didn't have any books on how to fight that.

"I can't play both your protector and your villain, Sarah." Jareth's words made her blush even more deeply.

His life was as entrenched here as her own, they had a year until college and then perhaps they could be free of one another but she had to make peace with his existence until then. It would be a dirty lie if she said she never wanted to see him again, but then she wasn't really ready to act like his friend either because her mistrust ran deep. It was all too tangled, and Sarah wished for simplicity. They stood there silently, him a statue waiting for her response.

"What if we just had a big do over? No iron, no magic, just surviving high school. I could use someone for group work in lit, anyway, and I assume we'll be in honors again together next year…" His eyebrow arched delicately and Sarah continued, gathering steam behind her own idea. "As a show of good faith you could, you know, exist to everyone else. I mean, I think you'll find no one really cares what you do anyway. We could pretend at normal for a bit."

Jareth broke eye contact with her and seemed to consider for a moment. "I suppose that would lessen the drama of all this. However, my nature is magic, I can't promise its total absence." He smiled, something a little feral, and continued. "It sounds to me like you're brokering a deal for our continued association."

Unlike fae, Sarah could lie through her teeth as much as she liked. "It's not like that. I'm just trying to cut down on distractions before senior year."

"So you find me distracting." The smile was no less disturbing as it widened.

"Goddam it, do you agree on the new normal or not?" Sarah did not want to travel down that line of thinking. Just getting out of fight or flight mode around him would probably bring her grades up, and that's all this was about: peace of mind. Yes, that's all it was.

***

"I hear a gorgeous guy was confessing his love to you at lunch. As your best friend if you don't tell me everything I'm bound by the Best Friend Code to make something up and swear to everyone that's the honest truth of the matter." Dawn ambushed her at her locker in as much time as it took her to get from her last class of the day and down the hallway.

Sarah reminded herself that punching her locker would only result in a sore hand, and tried to tell herself that this was what she had asked for, sort of. Nothing ever seemed to go smoothly when Jareth was involved.


	10. Family Matters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge props to my first ever beta reader nothingnothingtralala who put the shine to this chapter that my writing has been lacking!
> 
> She was the best and only beta I ever had.

Sarah seemed more out of sorts than usual in math, having completed none of the problems on the massive end of year review packet the teacher had handed them earlier this week. A few were done half-heartedly with no work shown except for a couple here and there that were clearly in her friend Dawn's sweeping loopy numbers instead of Sarah's own narrow and pointier writing. After editing a largenumber of her essay drafts Jareth was sure he could have picked her writing out of a stack, or forge it. The latter should not be necessary, but he knew it was in his nature to store abilities and catalogue them in the library of his mind. The longer lived you were, the more mental organization counted to stave off the appearance of carelessness.

"Are you ill?"

"What?" Sarah was staring after Dawn, who had broken away from their little work group of three to ask the teacher a question about the upcoming end of semester test, and Jareth seized the opportunity. While not possessing excessive amounts of guile on her own, Sarah was very good at not being available or even locatable when she didn't want to be. He'd been piqued by his lack of access to her.

"Yesterday in English you did not contribute to the discussion on poetry when I know for a fact you were poring over Neruda less than a week ago from the reading list. There are other inconsistencies in your behavior but that one stands out as a clear warning sign." Politely, he allowed silence to filter between them as she went from red faced to pale. Clearly she was trying to decide what to tell him, if anything.

Glancing over once more at Dawn, who seemed to be deep in debate with the math teacher about the legitimacy of her answer on the word problem, she came to a swift decision. "You mean no one else told you? You don't watch many movies, do you…"

"I've experienced them before; charming way to tell a story even if the substance of the stories themselves seem a bit weak." Growing up on epic sagas of love and loss, it was hard to take seriously the troubles of horny teens being carved up by masked ghouls and other two dimensional constructions. Live theater was much more vital in comparison, even if there was plenty of tripe there as well.

Through gritted teeth, Sarah tried to explain her woes. Empathy was hard for his kind, but he made his best attempt to listen with a facsimile of concern on his face. It wasn't all pretend; her agitation made him uncomfortable on a deeper level than expected.

"My mother is an actress, on stage and in films. I could easily point her out to you in any supermarket right now because her face is splashed across all the magazines, but then I don't suppose you spend much time in supermarkets." Sarah took a breath and gave a shaky little laugh devoid of humor. "I look almost exactly like her when she was my age. I've seen pictures."

Jareth was not really grasping what the actual problem was. He understood that she was experiencing shame for something her far away mother had done that was apparently interesting enough to be national gossip. Being the one who had made the rumors that then reached his disapproving family, he wondered if they felt such obvious dismay in private for his duties as Goblin King. Unlike Sarah's anguish, the thought of theirs was more clinical curiosity than something he cared about. That had not been the case a century ago, his heart slowly calcifying in the face of their disdain.

"Well, she's broken up with her long time rich producer boyfriend for the co-star of the summer film that comes out in a couple months. I bet it's a publicity stunt. Linda Williams, the femme fatale strikes again! Broken hearts follow her like a trail of tears… or that's what I read on the cover yesterday when I went to pick up some gum at the corner store."

Ah, so it was simply misplaced shame.

"Her life is her own. How does this involve you?" He plotted a few more points on the graph of the hyperbolic function they had been asked to represent before meeting her furious glare. She was mad at _him_ now? Perhaps he should have let her work things out on her own.

Voice tuned low for him alone in the buzzing room, her slim frame was quivering with tension. "Everyone expects me to be just like her. I look just like her! So naturally I'm just going to be Linda Williams the Second and go into acting and… I'm not her! I don't have charisma like her. I don't have confidence like her. And most importantly I don't go throwing myself at every man who can give me something I want." Sarah had brought tears to her own eyes with the furious whispers in his direction. Clapping a hand over her mouth as if realizing she had said something out loud that she never meant to, she stood up suddenly and bolted from the room, only keeping enough of her mind to grab the bathroom pass hanging by the door.

The teacher looked on impassively as Sarah rushed out, clearly not in the mood for teenage drama at the end of the term when there was work to be done. Dawn bit her lip, looking like she wanted to follow her friend out, but ended up turning back to answer a question the teacher had asked and holding her ground.

"Trouble in paradise?" A classmate in a cluster of desks next to them that Jareth was vaguely aware was named Benny, leaned back and smiled at Jareth as if communicating some male understanding of female irrationality. Ever since he had become visible, Jareth had been prone to all sorts of unsolicited interactions with classmates. Even if he was irritated with Sarah's emotional response, he felt protective of other people's judgment of her.

"Just attend to your own work." He put a core of the steel he couldn't touch into his words to the boy.

"Geez man, just trying to relate. My sister went ballistic on me this morning. At least your girl didn't brain you with a shoe." He lifted up his dark bangs to show the beginning of a goose egg on the side of his forehead. "It'll be great when my sis is graduated and out of the house."

Jareth didn't attempt to refute the factual error in Benny's sentence, as denying his connection to Sarah seemed to strengthen people's assumptions that he and Sarah were "dating." They did spend a lot of time together, in class anyway, and he had spurned the advances of the other women who had approached him (from shy freshmen sticking notes into the locker he didn't use, to brash seniors asking him to escort them to the end of the school celebrations) so people assumed he did it because they were involved. Sarah's reputation for frigidity had laid an uncertain groundwork to the rumor, though, so he was shocked this boy would say anything to him directly. Sarah was not "his."

"Besides, I noticed you carrying around that C++ book last week and I wanted you to know I've been trying to program a little at home myself. There's a club, and we meet after school once a week." Benny was rushing his words, in that way people do when they might have rehearsed what to say and then go off script anyway. "I know school's practically over, but we're trying to meet this summer. I've got a soldering iron and another guy got ahold of a broken computer from his dad's work… anyway…"

Maybe Sarah's idea to become visible to the student body wasn't merely bother, after all.

"What kind of computer is it?" It didn't matter; Jareth knew that within a month he would probably find himself in a basement with a handful of teenagers talking about computers. It should have felt like a waste of time, but somehow it felt more like progress.

***

Jareth watched Sarah enter literature class that same day and wondered why he tried to relate to her at all. Upon her return earlier she had snatched up her math work and she and Dawn had had their own little summit on the State of Sarah in the corner until the bell rang. In response to their snub, he had simply finished the math work and engaged in the sleight of hand that banished his papers to an extra dimensional holding space. Jareth was not about to carry all his books with him, nor could he use the metallic lockers without strong adverse consequences. It was probably one of the most advanced magical tricks he was able to perform while so cut off from his home.

Her eyes were no longer red and puffy from her cry earlier, and the guilty look in her eyes told him she was aware she had acted oddly to his concern before lunch. The possibility of Sarah apologizing was slim, but at least he knew they were ok when she readily handed over her poem draft for peer review.

If nothing else he longed to tell her that while she was not her mother, she had plenty of charisma. He didn't want to fully admit that the forces that drew him to her were localized to his own mind. Purposefully, he brushed her hand as they exchanged papers again and reaffirmed that static-y feeling she gave him even as she gasped and bonelessly dropped their work on the floor. Jareth was walking a rope over a precipice, and beneath him was all sorts of involvement in mortal life extraneous to his stated mission.

Sarah was both lure and trap. He couldn't afford to be distracted by her and yet he couldn't resist allowing it to happen anyway.

"Someday you'll have to tell me what poetry sounds like in your native language…" she said absently, smiling. The suggestions on how to improve his work were in green colored pencil in the margins of his poem; she always provided specific and helpful feedback even when he wasn't taking something very seriously.

"It's mostly about war and romance." Jareth didn't add that there was a wealth of literature on mortal abductions as well, which in a way usually ended in war or romance.

"One more thing we have in common, I guess!" She was searching for how they were alike, he could see, to ease her own mind about him still. He had never felt more alien.


	11. Let's Dance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Note: New Coke was a product released in the mid-80s that was notoriously reviled. It lasted a few months in the US and a little longer than that in Canada before 'classic' coke was brought back.

Sarah searched for what she was feeling at the moment, unsuccessfully. Her sore feet were dangling off the side of the rock overlooking the sluggish cement reinforced waterway that looped through the park near her house. Some ways away the water swirled in and out of a duck pond and made its way to whatever its destination was, downhill from here. The cement eventually fell away and allowed it to meander properly. In many ways she felt similarly about her life, pulled along by invisible forces between immovable barriers…

"You should be more careful near moving water." Jareth sat down, leaving enough space between them to prevent casual touching, and handed her a can of soda while snapping open his own. It still boggled her mind that he ate or drank anything at all, and she wasn't sure how he secured his supply, but as long as he didn't try to foist any New Coke* on her she would accept it graciously.

He perched next to her with languid grace, his bowtie loose around his neck but his formal wear otherwise unruffled. A plastic crown twinkled ironically in the moonlight atop his pale blond hair.

"Can I trust you to stop a nix from drowning me?" Sarah opened the soda carefully, letting it fizz angrily before entirely opening it. However Jareth stored them, they always came to her as if he had been shaking them furiously—something she had found out after displeasing mishaps with the first couple.

"Knowing you, I trust you would take off running at the sight of the nude male form regardless of his attempts to beguile you."

She covered up her blush with anger. "Nice to know you'd stand by and laugh."

"We have weeks before the solstice, there's little need to be on guard. Besides, they rarely attempt to poach the prey of others." He said it to make her feel better, she knew, but Sarah felt, all the same, that familiar jolt of fear: regardless of anything else she was still 'prey' to him on some level.

The points of the minty green heels Dawn had had her buy to match the poof of a prom dress reminded Sarah that walking home meant putting them back on. Even if she felt uncomfortable right here and now alone with Jareth, the shoes were a worse option for the moment. Dawn had promised she had a 'connection' for beer and would meet them at a discreet location after they got tired of the dance, but it seemed the after party where they had planned to relax and gossip had been derailed by unseen forces. Sarah secretly suspected the cute senior who had nervously asked her friend to the dance was to blame for the delay.

"So, how does it feel to be the king?" Sarah nodded to his plastic crown and he gave her a quick laugh followed by a toothy grin. "You didn't rig anything did you?"

"Pardon?"

"You didn't arrange it so you would be elected prom king, did you?" Popularity wasn't something he cared about, even if it had found him in their moderately sized high school. The speed at which he had become not only famous but actually respected was boggling her mind. Sarah had watched girls nearly swoon has he passed them, seemingly oblivious to their antics. He swore he was not enchanting the student body, so she supposed it was his natural charisma.

Jareth snorted, a rather indelicate noise to come from that patrician profile. "The very idea of electing royalty is preposterous. But if it eases your mind, no I had no part in engineering this rise to power."

The fangirl screams that had rocked the gym as he had ascended the stage had been real enough. Jareth was a junior and should not have been even on the ballot, but somehow the committee had put him on because it was a junior/senior prom after all and shouldn't they give a nod to half the population attending? And hadn't a junior girl won prom queen that one time? Sarah had heard the conversations on the tip of people's tongues as he had entered, even as speculation about them mortified her. Why hadn't they come together? Were they not actually a couple? Why would he dance with other girls? Did anyone else have a chance?

Sarah had secretly hoped Dawn and her date would join them to deconstruct the experience because there was a lot of drama to unpack before the last couple weeks of school. Right now the lanky senior from the basketball team was probably stumbling through a confession that would amount to nothing as he left for college and Dawn continued to live her life. That was how these kinds of things went. To be in the same place at the same time as the person you liked and be able to nurture the spark already felt rare.

"Just give me a couple minutes and then could you walk me home? I don't think I could outrun anything in these shoes." Sarah gave an apologetic smile, but turned her face away immediately as she saw the flicker of disappointment on Jareth's face.

"You would want the night to end so early?"

"This feels like the longest Saturday of my life. After the phone calls to coordinate, there was the exfoliating and the nail painting and the hair poofing and the makeup.. and then there were pictures in what felt like every location pictures could feasibly be taken in… and then hours at the dance itself! I feel like I've been 'at the dance' since 10am this morning." She examined his carefully neutral face. "And let me guess, you snapped a suit into place minutes before you arrived fashionably late."

It sounded like she hadn't had a good time, the way she was whining. To be honest, it had actually been fun. She had loved getting ready with Dawn and how excited her parents were to take pictures of the girls, even as Toby ran around the lawn and ruined half of them. Then there had been all the laughter as they had tried to move in their heels over the grass and get to Dawn's house so Dawn's family could fuss over them too. They'd eaten a quick meal there before Dawn's date had picked them both up and driven them to the dance.

Sarah felt perfectly content talking with classmates and watching the fashion show as people entered. Benny, the most surprising of Jareth's new friends, who was like a powder blue beacon in his suit, had come to find her and say hi before retreating back into his group of friends. He had been looking for Jareth, and it never ceased to amaze her that people thought she knew where he was at any given time. It wasn't like she was his keeper.

Besides, when Jareth had finally shown up he was unmistakable. Unlike in the classroom, where he seemed to keep a purposefully low profile, in a social situation like this she could totally believe he was royalty. Politely, he had moved through the room and mixed with just about every group in some way. It might have even been unconscious, the way he worked the room like a politician. By the time he finally made it over to Sarah, punch for her carefully poised in his gloved hand, all she'd been able to do was laugh. Naturally he hadn't understood what she found so funny. He was doing the socially acceptable thing at a formal dance. Once Sarah explained to him that most people just kept to their friend groups and danced with their date or with the crowd he allowed his displeasure to show a little. He made a comment about how modern society had lost even the most basic grasp of social niceties and she had called him a crotchety old man. Jareth had got a little stormy about that, even though she had meant it as a joke. Usually only skirting the edges of seriousness, something about the environment had brought out his sincerity and he took offense where none was intended. Attempts to laugh away the comment while not giving away any details of his fae ancestry had come out awkward and only dug the hole deeper.

After that Sarah was sure he had danced with every girl _but_ her just to punish her. It was only a punishment if she had wanted to dance with him, she told herself. The apology for, she assumed, hurting his _feelings_ couldn't leave her lips since she couldn't get within ten feet of him.

"I think you finally convinced the school that we're not dating." _By cutting me so hard even the teacher chaperones noticed and came to see if I was ok._ Her words broke the unusually companionable silence. "So there's that." If wistfulness had entered her tone she would never admit to it. And my, weren't the stars so bright it made the eyes water just a tad.

If he noticed the quiver in her tone he was discreet enough not to bring it up. "If you would prefer a return to ambiguity… I was under the impression you found the deceit distasteful."

Honestly, she would have welcomed it, but found herself shaking her head. "You might be good at fooling people, but I'm always the weak link in the chain. I can't lie about my feelings." Sarah was not so good an actress that she could pretend she liked him to the world while pretending that she didn't in private to him and all the while liking him in truth—it would be too farcical. With a jolt as powerful as when Jareth touched her, she realized from the path of her inner thoughts that she liked him. Sarah wanted more from him than friendship despite the age difference, the magic, the fear of abduction, and very real and practical issue of separating for college in a year. Stubbornly, she told her burning cheeks to halt giving away her mortification at her own easily compromised ideals regarding both fae and high school relationships. Time to let those thoughts steep until she knew what to do with them.

"So I've noticed." His hand twisted a little and the soda can was gone. She really wished she could learn how to do that, it was honestly amazing. They sat in silence a little longer, and Sarah felt her heart stretch and warp as she struggled to understand why she couldn't just let him go. She could still safely call him a friend, even if everyone had thought them more, and she could work with that. Jareth was handsome as a painting with his pale coloring washed out in the light of the waning half-moon, and after he stood he offered a gloved hand to her.

"I guess it's that time." Sarah put on a brave smile and accepted the hand to get her down from the rock face, but he didn't let her go once she was firmly on the ground. His hand clasped her waist and he twirled her into something that started out like a waltz but then lost its rigidity as he hummed a tune under his breath. Jareth was intent, his grip properly firm to lead the dance, but also avoiding eye contact until he came to the end of the unfamiliar tune. Finally relinquishing her, he gave a courtly bow and Sarah continued her stunned stillness. She could have sworn those eyes of his were each a different color again for a moment, something that only happened when magic was at play, but she didn't feel alarmed and blamed her treacherous heart for its lack of caution.

With a flourish he moved his plastic crown to the top of her slightly deflated hair, and Sarah finally let a smile break over her face. "I owed you a dance," Jareth said as she curled her bare toes in the grass, shoes forgotten and heart hammering.

At home, face down in her pillow, she would bemoan both the fact that a kiss was practically demanded in that scenario and that she hadn't had the balls to do it. He couldn't; she had been so vocal about him keeping his distance that any move was her responsibility now. Instead, she stared at the cheap plastic jewels on the crown and wondered what next?


	12. Fun and Games

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If Jareth just made all these nerdy friends, naturally time in basement tinkering with computers would devolve into time in basement playing board games which would devolve into time in basement playing D&D.
> 
> He also strikes me as the kind of person to recreate himself as closely as possible in the game. Elven sorcerer anyone?
> 
> It's the only thing that made sense.

"You look like hell, Jareth."

Sarah put a warm croissant in front of him, and he didn't even have the presence of mind to give her that flirty glance that normally came when she offered him pastry. It was her break at her part-time job at the café, and despicably early for any respectable teen on summer vacation. Sarah hoped to pull an afternoon shift soon, but she was slowly accepting the reality that as least senior on the staff she was going to have to accept the modest morning rush gracefully before three hours of near solitude. "Do I need to get the jam out as well?"

Bags under his eyes were pronounced today due to his insistence that he study in the afternoons, meet with his new friends to talk computers every other evening, and then wake up indecently early to visit her after the morning rush. Initially she had said something along the lines of 'I'll bet you can't keep up a schedule like this' and the keen look he had gotten when he had asked what she'd be willing to wager made her stomach drop to her knees. Her answer had been joking, but she wondered if he thought she had been serious because he was burning the candle at both ends to collect.

"What do you know about so called 'role-playing games'?" Jareth asked in a scratchy voice, before clearing his throat and straightening his shoulders from their slumped position. Sarah sipped her iced coffee and allowed her silent attentiveness to nudge him to talk. He did so love to fill silences when he was annoyed by something. "Last night, as you might have surmised, we reached the end of our third go at the game Risk."

Sarah carefully kept a neutral expression, remembering his towering rage at losing to a myopic, pimply kid hundreds of years his junior. World domination was serious business to the fae, but even more so winning games was a matter of pride and a signal of guile and experience. Losing to someone who was his inferior in every way he had of measuring himself had made him absolutely horrid company for the rest of the week. Benny had privately called to let her know that this current game was going to be the last one since the others in the computer club were more than a little scared by Jareth's intensity for it, and that he'd really like her to back them up. Privately, she thought a dose of humility was good for Jareth's soul.

"So your new strategy didn't work out?"

Even tired he ate elegantly, using a knife and fork to divide the small croissant neatly into quarters. Behind him in the window the morning light shifted and lit up his hair, giving him a golden halo. If not for the tired face and the cranky tone, he'd seem every bit the poised royal he was. A blush she couldn't control flushed her cheeks hotly as she tried to convince her body to calm down.

"It worked too well," Jareth said darkly. "I encountered no opposition and crushed them beneath my heel. They no longer wish to play that game, but there is so much value inherent in the lessons it teaches…"

She tried to laugh off his disappointment gently. "That game takes hours and hours, there's got to be something more rewarding you can do with that time. Did you all get that computer to finally start up properly?"

"Sarah, haven't you realized that it's the long games that are the most fulfilling to win?" He sustained eye contact until she got the shivers and was unsure of where the conversation had wandered, before turning his attention back to the buttery pastry. "At last the short one, Harry—"

"Henry," she chirped, reminding him.

"Whatever." His tone mimicked Dawn's so precisely that Sarah almost snorted coffee out her nose. Sarah's discomfort cajoled a smile from him at last. "_Henry_ suggested we play Dungeons and Dragons which, despite its highly dubious sounding name, did not feature either of those things in actuality."

The bell above the door rang as a customer entered and Sarah quickly rose to take her place behind the counter. While she poured coffee into a to-go cup and bagged up a cheese Danish, she kept a furtive eye on Jareth. In the presence of a stranger it was like he had transformed: clothes no longer rumpled, face alert, while he scanned the room and casually picked up a discarded newspaper from a patron this morning. He looked like nothing could touch him. It occurred to Sarah that even seeing him tired and cranky was a form of casual association other people weren't privy to, and that bit of intimacy made her heart beat just a little harder.

Once she sat back down he immediately discarded the paper and resumed his story. "This Dee and Dee game is hardly a game, more like some sort of communal storytelling, and I played such things as a child with my nurse…" Sarah tried to imagine Jareth as a child but found herself thinking of Toby, since that was her best and most reinforced reference for blond babies these days. "But never did it require so much preparation!"

"Like what?" Her knowledge of what this entailed was pretty much limited to church fanatics claiming it was witchcraft and a few glances at books in stores here and there. She remembered lists of numbers more than anything else and had closed it hastily.

"You make an imaginary person, with imaginary powers and then outfit them with imaginary gear while not exceeding the imaginary money you supposedly have. Then you wander around in dangerous places to try to make more imaginary money and 'level up'—whatever that entails." Jareth's disdain was clear. Sarah supposed when you had lived a life out of storybooks and legend, then just pretending at it would seem silly. However, he usually bore this kind of thing from his new friends with a little more tolerance, so something he wasn't saying was at play here.

"You died, didn't you!" It was a stab in the dark, but the way his eyes pierced her she knew she was right. From his perspective he had lost at another game, she supposed.

Grumbling something under his breath, Jareth took a bite of food so that he could ignore her laughter. He took a steadying breath and answered her. "Yes, my imaginary construct died. But really the whole idea of 'spells per day' is ludicrous. That's not how magic works. The energy you manipulate and refocus is not entirely dependent on some sort of internal counter. Whoever built the rules for this game obviously doesn't understand the way of things."

"I'd risk saying that the person who made up Dungeons and Dragons probably doesn't do real magic." Sarah tried not to let herself sound sarcastic. What was obvious to her might not be so obvious to Jareth. She'd had to point out human limitations to him before, but usually only when he was carelessly assuming something. When he had a moment to consider the logic of things, he typically came around to the same conclusions.

Jareth gave her one of those 'silly human' looks that seemed to happen more often when he was tired. "There are books upon books of rules and many hold illustrations. There are things in there, drawn in expert detail, that shouldn't even have a name in your world. Someone involved in this must be fae, or at least has visited the Underground with enough time to catalogue some highly aggressive creatures."

"You do seem to love constructing arbitrary rules and then breaking them," Sarah said thoughtfully, wondering now if maybe he had a point.

"Loopholes, my dear Sarah." He caught up her hand from where it had been resting on the table and flipped it over to draw circles on her palm. As always, the contact jarred her at first and then evened out into a warm happiness at his touch. "We don't break rules; we flow between them like water."

Too soon for her, he relinquished her hand, and Sarah sat there willing herself not to grab his own back to her. Having a crush on a boy was agony, she knew that from Dawn pining over various classmates, but being in love with one felt like slowly suffocating—her lungs couldn't take in enough air when he was this close.

"And the next time a trio of orcs charge me, I will not be out of fireballs!"

Sarah had no idea what he was talking about, but at least they were both in a better mood than they had started the day with.


	13. Sarah's Loss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Needless to say, any conversation with Jareth that begins "I bet you won't…"

A part of her hadn't thought he'd really collect. Once the computer club finally got their project up and running, Jareth was missing most of a night's sleep to be able to visit her at the café in the mornings. His hollow cheeks and sunken eyes made him look like he was on the verge of death, and still the fire burned in him when she said that they should call off the bet. He had accused her of being worried that he would win, and she had sincerely responded that she was worried about his health—it was not impossible to be simultaneously concerned for his health and her impending loss. The one month mark that defined the end of the time limit broke with warm drizzling rain, as Sarah mourned the loss of her Saturday.

He didn't even have the grace to let her walk to his house in peace and instead was waiting at the edge of the sidewalk near her driveway, with eyes already less bruised: a result of from what she had assumed had been a long and triumphant night's sleep. This was supposed to be her day off, sacred even, but he had told her at work yesterday morning to not wear anything she would mind getting dirty. That had boded ill enough to keep her distracted through the phone call with Dawn to make excuses and free up the day, or when she was doing dishes and dropped a mug on her foot that thankfully didn't break as it rolled to the floor. She could still feel the bruise it had left as her tennis shoes rubbed against the spot.

"Please remember that 'slave for a day' is more a figure of speech and I will not call you master." Once she was in earshot of him she wanted to make sure the ground rules were very clear.

"Would 'personal servant' suit your sensibilities?" Jareth purred at her, audacious enough to remain perfectly dry while a fine mist settled over Sarah's hair and clothes.

"As a matter of fact, no, it wouldn't, but it's a lesser evil." The light cardigan she had put on to combat the summer rain was already making her skin feel humid and tacky. "Well? I don't want to stand in the rain all day."

"Temper!" Jareth watched as she stood defensively with crossed arms and stiff shoulders. "What if I said I wanted you to stand here all day, what would you do, my reluctant slave?"

Sarah huffed her exasperation. "Then I guess I'd have an easy day and you would have wasted a month of sleepless nights. And what happened to 'personal servant'?" He was clearly enjoying this much too much. To be honest, she was using anger to mask her nervousness at what this day might hold. She had idly said she'd be his slave for a day when he had asked about the stakes for pushing himself past the limits of human endurance. How easily she forgot he was inhuman, and yet she was constantly reminded of his fae nature.

"Now, Sarah, you said you'd be a willing participant in the outcome of our bet. I recall something along the lines of 'fair's fair' and that a person was only as good as their word."

"Don't you dare make this about my personal integrity! I'm here aren't I? I think I'm allowed to be a little disgruntled before you have me weeding your garden or painting or whatever dumb manual thing you want me to struggle at all day." Grumbling, Sarah began to follow Jareth as he headed back in the direction of his house.

"I would have banished a servant as impertinent as you by now, Sarah. You're not very good at this. Have a little pride!" His mocking laugh made her flush with anger as she walked a few steps behind, dragging her feet just enough to make a point. If she could laser a hole in the back of his blond head, her eyes would have done so during their walk. As it stood, his artfully messy locks merely made her wonder how soft his hair might be. Despite herself, this diffused some of her fury.

They continued in silence as Sarah stewed in her frustration and felt her breakfast—yogurt with granola in it—practically curdle in her stomach. It was a stupid thing that she had suggested this in jest, and even dumber that he had taken it seriously enough to put his health in jeopardy. What was it to him if she was his servant for any length of time? Did he just want to see her embarrassed? She might love the jerk, that couldn't be helped, but she didn't like him very much today. Displeasure thankfully helped her mask her awkward feelings. It had been a while since they had been alone in private.

When they arrived at his house she didn't hesitate to ascend the steps, stopping short under the porch next to the closed front door. Jareth looked from her to the door and then cleared his throat with an expectant tilt to his head.

"Oh." It took her a moment to realize his intention, and then she opened the door for him to sweep through regally. Gritting her teeth, she followed him in and peeled off her now soaked cardigan. Her bare arms were still damp enough to feel cold inside despite the temperate environment, and goosebumps provided a convenient focus for her discomfort with the whole situation.

"Upstairs, Sarah!" Jareth commanded, a disembodied voice above her.

Closing her eyes to sigh and gather her nerve, Sarah grimly ascended to the second level and then tried to process what this was about. As far as she knew there were only bedrooms up here and that had been nowhere near part of the deal today. The prospect of that was not entirely unwelcome — and she'd be lying if she said she hadn't had the possibility suggest itself to her imagination — but under these circumstances it would be unforgivable. Coercion wasn't sexy.

Poking his head out of a room, Jareth gave her an impatient look even though she had only paused at the top landing for a couple of moments. Well, maybe it had been longer than that as she listened to her own heart pound in her ears. Bravery was harder for her to come by when it was confused by emotion and doubts about intention, both hers and his.

"This way, Sarah!"

Forcing her slightly trembling hands to stop that nonsense, Sarah faced the room head on by practically rushing into it only to run smack into Jareth's back and nearly topple them both over into the pile of papers on the floor. She braced herself against his back, feeling the curve of his spine and the play of muscle under his shirt. The recently calmed goosebumps made an unwelcome reappearance, and she withdrew her hands after a moment's hesitation.

"Impertinent, tardy, _and_ clumsy. You're certainly not cut out for being a proper servant." Thankfully he didn't turn to face her, allowing her a moment to get her bearings.

"Thank you." She had meant to insert more venom in it, but it came out a little too breathless.

A long desk and reading lamp were pushed up next to the window. There were bookshelves and filing cabinets lining the rest of it, with papers all around the room in heaping piles while in other places they had been neatly stacked. The lack of order was immediately obvious.

"I had to special order plastic filing cabinets, so please don't take out too much of your temper on them. From what I understand they are not as sturdy as their metal cousins."

It didn't take long for Sarah to examine the mounds of papers, the haphazardly organized shelves, and Jareth's all too smug expression, before she blurted it out. "You want me to _file_ for you?!"

"It is a rather menial task, and one into which I hadn't really invested much time, since I can't currently accomplish it by magic. Alphabetizing the books by author should be the easiest place to start. Articles should be organized in topic groups and secondarily by author. You should be able to skim them to get the gist of how they could be collected together. Folders are in the box near the door. Oh, and Sarah—" This was so far beyond how she had expected to spend her day that she knew she was gaping at him like a fish. "—Remember to take out any of those pesky metal staples and use these plastic paperclips to hold things together."

He picked up her hand, making her note how nicely kept his nails seemed to be compared to her own, covered in some chipping red polish. The little box of paperclips did nothing but exist, but she glared at them all the same once they were dropped in her palm.

"Anything else?" Speaking through clenched teeth made her words sound muffled.

"I'll come and get you when I'm ready for you to make me lunch." He was all sweetness.

Sarah had never been a violent person, but once the door had closed behind him the box of paperclips hit it like a grenade.


End file.
